A multi-host mechanistic model of African swine fever emergence and control in Romania

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF) has devastating effects on swine production, farmer livelihood, animal welfare, and biodiversity. Extremely difficult to control, epidemic management is further complicated when spillover between domestic pig and wild boar populations is suspected. To quantify ASF viral transmission between domestic pigs and wild boar, a spatially-explicit stochastic mechanistic model was constructed using village centroids to represent aggregated backyard pig herds and a hexagonal raster of forest coverage to represent wild boar abundance. The model was parameterized to the initial six months of the ongoing Romanian epidemic through approximate Bayesian computation. It was estimated that a median of 69.4% (interquartile range: 53.0–80.0%) of domestic pig herd cases came from other infected domestic pig herds while 20.4% (11.2–33.8%) originated from infected wild boar sources, and 8.4% (4.7–14.2%) stemmed from external sources not explicitly represented. Also, 31.9% of infected wild boar habitat (16.7–56.2%) originated from domestic pig herds and 68.1% (43.8–83.3%) came from neighboring infected wild boar populations. Furthermore, it was found that habitats with a forest coverage greater than 15% were 2.6 times more infectious and 5.3 times more susceptible than other habitats. All alternative control scenarios, including culling domestic pig herds upon local domestic pig or wild boar case detection, improved epidemic outcomes, with the greatest decrease in final epidemic size being observed from the reactive culling of entire villages following case detection. These results can be used to further inform policy recommendations in ASF-epidemic regions.Significance StatementThe current African swine fever (ASF) pandemic is devastating to affected nations, and quantifying transmission parameters is critical to informing control strategies. Disease spillover between wild and domestic hosts further complicates control efforts, yet the influence of spillover events on epidemic propagation remains unknown. Using the context of Romania—one of the European nations with the most severe epidemic and where spillover transmission is strongly suspected—we show that targeting spillover mechanisms is critical for achieving holistic disease control, and then demonstrate the impact of alternative control scenarios had they been enacted. These results can inform control strategy policy decisions in the many nations at-risk for or actively experiencing ASF epidemics.